Letter to the editor: Calling on the Founders to respond to Project 2025

One answer from our Founders that I could offer in response to Project 2025, to those installing a version of the Ten Commandments in public schools, to those who want to “teach” the Bible and Christianity in American public schools comes from Thomas Jefferson’s Jan. 27, 1800, letter to Joseph Priestley:

“Pardon, I pray you, the temporary delirium which has been excited here, but which is fast passing away. The Gothic idea that we are to look backwards instead of forwards for the improvement of the human mind, and to recur to the annals of our ancestors for what is most perfect in government, in religion and in learning, is worthy of those bigots in religion & government, by whom it has been recommended, and whose purposes it would answer, but it is not an idea which this country will endure.”

Second: Read the complete Benjamin Franklin Silence Dogood No. 9, which begins with: “It has been for some Time a Question with me, whether a Commonwealth suffers more by hypocritical Pretenders to Religion, or by the openly Profane? But some late Thoughts of this Nature, have inclined me to think, that the Hypocrite is the most dangerous Person of the Two, especially if he sustains a Post in the Government.”

Third, Thomas Jefferson to nephew Peter Carr Aug. 10, 1787, on how to read the Bible: “Fix reason firmly in her seat. … Question with boldness even the existence of a god … (and) the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from god.”

Bruce Braden

Carmel, Ind.

The writer is a Mt. Pleasant native.